A comprehensive website about emunah and core Torah concepts, with analysis and explanation of the writer’s personal growth experiences in Avodas Hashem and understanding of our relationship with HaKadosh Baruch Hu.

Happiness and pleasure can only be derived from His Will, for His Glory fills the world, there is none other.

Children know how to push our buttons. Maybe they like seeing our faces get red, our hands lift to our heads or whatever. Perhaps it gives them a sense of power to “stop” us from what they might perceive as crossing their boundaries. Surely parents have the obligation to shape their children. Yet when our buttons get pushed, what do we do?

Often we react. Over the course of having our families, we improve our reactions so that we become more rectified. Life is for learning. There is no one who is not in this system of having to work on improving their reactions. Some take responsibility, some do not. But the system is the system. We have buttons. We get triggered. Our reactions are strong. We often say things and do things we regret. We hurt others.

Everyone wants to know what was Hashem thinking? The angels mentioned this to Hashem and so Hashem creates forgiveness. Hashem wants us to have this role so much He is willing to put His Shechina in the lowliness of this darkness just to give us the opportunity to realize and declare with free will and speech Hashem Echad.

Rabbi Wallerstein tells a story about a mother whose son does not do well on the baseball team. It hurts his self-esteem when the other kids don’t really want him on the team. So the loving mother buys him an amazing wide aluminum bat that is easy to swing and control and has the ability to connect with a wide surface with the ball. She gives the bat to the child and he begins swinging and destroying everything the house with the bat. The mother goes up to him and he even hits her! Everyone is telling the mother to take the bat away from the child. But the mother says lovingly, tomorrow he will go outside and hit a home run. He just has to get used to the bat.

This story is a metaphor for Hashem, like the mother, and the boy, like Nishmas Am Yisrael. Hashem has given Nishmas Am Yisrael an amazing bat. Free will combined with speech. With that, we can take the energy pitched to us through nature and human nature and connect it so that it soars heavenly creating positive influence. The thing is, we have to have an understanding of the energy being pitched to us and what it is for.

Our relationship with our reactions when our buttons get pushed can change enough to keep us from getting flattened by them. We have to have enough self-awareness and knowledge to understand that it is a button being pushed and not our essential self being abandoned or annihilated. This wisdom must be at the very core of our intellect so that our imagination at all times is to this truth in order to cling to revealing Hashem’s Attrributres of mercy, tolerating insult, overlooking faults, bearing the burden of confusion of mind, forgiving, casting sins into the sea, living with emunah and bitachon with complete clarity that our survival is at all times in hashem’s hands alone. That emunah, that intellectual understanding concretized into our consciousness gives us the freedom to arouse love in our hearts and choose to say out loud, Hashem Echad. I know it is from You, and I wish to connect all of what is happening heavenly to create positive influence by emulating You.

We don’t find it pleasant to have to experience the discomfort of our buttons being pushed. But we can shorten the amount of time we spend in that uncomfortable place and we can bring benefit by understanding and acting meaningfully in the functioning of Nishmas Am Yisrael. The default position is to let our experientially internalized externalities (i.e. circumstances, ego, personality and everything other than tzelem elokim) swing wildly causing destruction in the heavens and on earth, Gd forbid. Hashem waits patiently for us to latch onto our role as Nishmas Am Yisrael. We can wean ourselves to the pleasure He Designs for us by recognizing that happiness and pleasure can only be derived from His Will, for His Glory fills the world, there is none other. Bringing our will in line with this is empowering. It IS what gives us distinction and reflects spiritual maturity and understanding.

May we use our imaginations to cling to revealing Hashem’s Attributes of mercy in order to align ourselves with the absolute truth of existence. May the calmness we feel that is built into us to experience if we search for it be the internal confirmation we need in order to reinforce our efforts more and more in this direction. And may all of Jewish History until now that is teaching us that we are empowered with free willed choice and speech specifically to do this rectification of Adom’s sin, restoring the only Glory in the world is Hashem’s Glory without confusion in our mind due to ego, come onto the side of merit, wiping off the elements of nature concealing Hashem’s Glory because of our confusion and removing all destructive beings created before this. May Hashem’s first born, Nishmas Am Yisrael, lovingly reframe and connect the energies as Hashem has empowered us to do so that there should soon be a new light in the world, Hashem’s Glory revealed.